McCain Blasts Putin in Opinion Piece on Russian Website

Article Appears on the Pro-Kremlin Pravda.ru, a Rebuttal to Putin's Comments

By

Lukas I. Alpert

Updated Sept. 19, 2013 12:37 p.m. ET

MOSCOW—Veteran cold warrior
John McCain
has turned to a namesake of a famed Soviet-era publication to rebut Russian President
Vladimir Putin
's
op-ed in the New York Times last week, telling Russians they deserve better than their current leadership and calling the country's government corrupt and repressive.

The 77-year-old senator from Arizona published on Thursday an article on the pro-Kremlin website Pravda.ru, which supports Mr. Putin's United Russia party and is a rival of the newspaper of the same name owned by the opposition Communist Party.

Mr. McCain lit into Mr. Putin with gusto following the Russian president's Sept. 11 opinion piece in The Times that blasted the U.S. push for military intervention in Syria as flying in the face of international law and questioned the concept of "American exceptionalism" as "extremely dangerous."

Mr. McCain, who spent five-and-a-half years as a POW during the Vietnam War, accused Mr. Putin of befriending "tyrants" and turning his back on efforts to build a "safer, more peaceful and prosperous world."

"President Putin doesn't believe in these values because he doesn't believe in you. He doesn't believe that human nature at liberty can rise above its weaknesses and build just, peaceful, prosperous societies. Or, at least, he doesn't believe Russians can. So he rules by using those weaknesses, by corruption, repression and violence. He rules for himself, not you," the Republican senator wrote.

Later Thursday, Mr. Putin said he was puzzled why Mr. McCain looked to Pravda to express his views. "The senator has his own way of looking at things, but I think he lacks information about our country," he said. "He wants to be published in the most authoritative and widely circulated publication. Pravda is a respected publication … but its circulation is minimal."

Speaking to a group of international journalists and foreign policy experts, Mr. Putin said he had come up with the idea for the Times piece on his own and told aides he wanted it placed in an American newspaper that would reach a wide audience. He said he updated the article at the last minute after reading that President Barack Obama said in an address to the nation that America was "exceptional."

"When I read [the address] to the end, it became clear to me that what I had in the article was not enough," said Mr. Putin. "I then took the article and right there wrote out the last paragraph."

The original Pravda publication, whose title means "Truth," was once a widely read Soviet-era Kremlin propaganda organ with a daily circulation of more than one million readers but which closed in the 1990s.

An ugly split between the two publications emerged out of the ashes of the paper: Pravda.ru was founded by journalists from the original Pravda, while the Communist Party created another paper with the same name. The two went to court over who had legitimate claim to the title, but in the end an arbitration court ruled both did. Both publications now have small, niche readerships.

A spokesman for Mr. McCain said the senator submitted his article to both publications, aware of the "controversy there over which one is the legitimate successor to the old Soviet paper."

The Pravda newspaper, which publishes three times a week, now claims a circulation of 100,000, while Pravda.ru averages about a million page views per week, according to similarweb.com.

Other American politicians have countered Mr. Putin's remarks in Russian media. Rep.
Steve Israel
(D., N.Y.) earlier this week had a piece published in the influential Kommersant business daily. And Rep.
Buck McKeon
(R., Calif.) had an op-ed this week in Russia's leading independent English-language daily, the Moscow Times.

The idea for Mr. McCain's article originated from an appearance he made on CNN on Sept. 13 to blast Mr. Putin's article, during which the one-time Republican candidate for president joked that he "would love to have a commentary in Pravda." By choosing the emblematic Pravda as the vehicle for his article, Mr. McCain found himself at the center of the longstanding feud between the publications.

When contacted by a reporter about Mr. McCain's comment, the editor of Pravda.ru,
Dmitry Sudakov,
said he would be happy to publish the piece. The website said it later contacted Mr. McCain's team and an agreement was reached for it to publish the editorial.

Explaining why a pro-Kremlin website would publish an anti-Putin editorial, Pravda.ru Chairman
Vadim Gorshenin
wrote: "We truly believe that it is better to discuss problematic issues through the press, rather than through saber-rattling. … Russian media today are no less open to debate than any Western publications are."

But the sniping between the two Pravdas emerged once again after Mr. Sudakov's offer. First the head of the Communist Party said the Pravda newspaper would print an editorial only if it was in line with the party's position on Syria—that the conflict is a war between a legitimate government and gang of terrorists supported from abroad. The editor of the newspaper also dismissed the website as "some editorial office of Pravda in Oklahoma City."

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